Nail House Series

Based on found photographic images of nail houses; architectural holdouts, buildings that people refuse to leave, these buildings become sites of symbolic resistance. The Nail House Series begins with drawing, then painting and moves into sculptural and abstract forms. Tangible symbols referencing built structures mirror the nails that stick out and then expand into unknown territories, changing realities and illusionary spaces.

Nail House Drawings

Referring to real architectural holdouts, where people refuse to make way for the demolition of their homes, these drawings mediate between the photographic records circulating the internet and an ongoing series of paintings. Giving form to the ‘nails that stick out’ is an act of slow archival resistance, a haptic intervention against erasures on digital platforms or city streets. The drawings have to be barely there, a conjuring line on the cusp of one thing or another, a universal something that stands in for something else; they are no place and every place on contested ground.

A grid of 9 of these drawings won the Student Award at the Trinity Buoy Wharf (formerly Jerwood) Drawing Prize 2018.

Nail House Paintings

The Nail Houses are an ongoing series inspired by architectural holdouts and their photographic records circulated on the internet. Mediated through drawings that become reference points for paintings, a paired-down pallet of black, white and cadmium yellow transforms these homes under siege into moated castles, hilltop citadels or towering blocks. Situated between presence and absence, they are of no place and every place and that’s the point. These small almost recognisable things might be picked up in the hand or tower overhead, unanchored, nothing is clear-cut on contested land. As paintings they too are stubborn nails, tip-toeing on unknown territories of power, haptic interventions against erasures on digital platforms or city streets, they manifest a slow archival resistance.

Nail House Book

Written from the artists perspective, this publication pieces together the research and ideas that underpin an ongoing series of art works and investigations into nail houses (buildings from which the individual or group refuse to be moved) and the broader socio-political contexts in which they and we exist.